Chapter Six
SIX
I SIT ON THE EDGE of the road, my heart still thumping hard and fast, as I try to collect my thoughts and assess the damage.
My leather jacket and jeans took most of the abrasion.
Little bits of bloody grit are embedded in my left knee, where my jeans have shredded, but my adrenaline is still high enough that I don’t even feel it.
The observation is more academic than anything else.
I take a deep breath and realize my ribs are a little sore.
I’d landed with a hard oomph as my chest hit the pavement and I had the wind knocked out of me.
The scent of sulfur burns my nose as I get carefully to my feet and try to take stock of my surroundings.
When I hear the sudden roar of a truck engine in the direction I’ve just come from, I whip around and am nearly blinded by the truck’s bright headlights.
It approaches slowly but, even though I try to wave it down, it passes me by and then suddenly speeds off into the darkness.
Before it disappears, I notice a long scratch down the back fender and catch a glimpse of the truck’s back plate.
It might be nothing but, even in the backwoodsiest of backwoods towns, I’ve never known people to let a woman walk home by herself in the pitch-black of night without at least asking if she wants a ride.
I take a deep breath and look down the bank at Honey.
“Oh man,” I breathe raggedly, my throat tightening with emotion.
It looks like she smacked every tree on the way down to where she now rests, the passenger side smashed against a huge old oak.
The engine has cut off, but her headlights and cabin light are still gleaming.
She seems so forlorn, lying there in her half-alive state, barely hanging on, that I can hardly stand to look at her.
“God,” I say. “I’m so sorry, Honey.”
I remember the day Tina handed me her keys. The way my heart swelled when I understood that she was mine. The promise I’d made to keep her safe. Tears suddenly sting my eyes and I scrape them away before getting into a crouch and starting the slow, awkward slide down the bank toward her.
“I’m sorry, Honey,” I say when I reach her. “I’m so sorry.”
I’m relieved, at least, to find that it doesn’t look like she’s going to slide any farther down the hill.
Aside from the oak that’s holding her steady at the middle, her front fender is lodged against a tall, skinny birch, its white bark scarred with Honey’s amber paint.
Carefully, I reach in and retrieve my bag from the passenger seat.
I also open the glove box and pull my gun case from it, open the lid, and run my fingers along the inscription there.
ANNIE GET YOUR GUN, it says, the words engraved in purpleheart wood.
I take my revolver and slide it into the holster at the back of my jeans, then close the case and slip it into my satchel. I pull my phone out and I’m disappointed to see that, while it’s still functioning, there’s no signal.
“Damn boonies,” I mutter. I open the notes app anyway and tap in the number plate from the truck that passed me. And then I sigh as I pat Honey’s wheel and say, “I’ll be back tomorrow. Okay? We’ll get you out of here.”
Tapping the flashlight on my phone, I shine it around, make sure I’m not about to leave anything obviously valuable or dangerous behind. Then, with a grimace, I turn the key backward.
Honey’s lights go out.
Clenching my teeth together, angry with myself for crashing and scared about leaving Honey here overnight, I lean forward, press my lips to her wheel, and give her a kiss before making my way back up the hill.
At the top, I fish out the bright tactical flashlight I keep in my bag and, finally, I start the slow walk back to town.
It’s after three o’clock in the morning when I make it back to my room at the Mount Zion Motel. I let myself in, throw the dead bolt, slide the chain lock in place, wedge a chair against the door, and then drop—jacket, shoes, bag, and all—onto the bed, exhausted.
This was no accident, I think to myself as my eyes close.
And I mentally catalogue all the people I’ve spoken to over the course of the day.
All the places I’ve been. Everyone who might know about my investigation.
It’s half the town, I realize. Place like this, everyone knows when a stranger comes to town. Everyone knows what they’re up to.
I think about Katie and her intuition, her apparent premonition, her history.
My mom left my father, Katie had said. And took me with her.
My mom left my father.
The words rattle around in my head. Echoing.
My mom left.
It’s my own voice I hear, as I slip into sleep.
I am ten years old, standing in the kitchen. It’s Saturday morning and, typically, my mom would already be awake, would have been for hours. She liked to make a big breakfast on Saturday mornings. Pancakes, usually. Which would sizzle on the griddle while the radio hummed low in the background.
But on this particular Saturday morning, she isn’t there.
Instead, there’s a note on the kitchen table. My mother’s handwriting. I pick it up and read it.
Johnny,
I’m sorry. I love you but I just can’t do this anymore. Take care of Annie.
Rochelle
I stare at the note in my hand. Read it again. And then again.
I love you but I just can’t do this anymore.
I stand there, holding her message, my heart thumping in my ears.
What will he do when he finds this? I think. What will he do?
I consider throwing the note in the trash.
Or tearing it up and flushing it. Or taking it outside and burning it.
But then I feel a sudden, sharp, screaming pain in my hand.
I look down and the note is gone. In its place is a snake, its fangs sunk into the soft flesh of my wrist. It hangs, heavy, from my arm, refusing to let go.
The rattle goes kssshhhhhhh.
I open my mouth to scream but, instead, I wake with a start, gasping, my heart thudding.
My arm is dead asleep, completely numb. I’d been lying on it, apparently, and cut off my own blood supply. Pins and needles quickly set in as I shake it out, and I’m looking around, blinking at my unfamiliar surroundings, when my phone buzzes inside my jacket pocket.
“Annie,” Leo’s voice says, soft as velvet, rich as wine. I smile at the sound of it, even as tears come to my eyes again, the image of Honey’s wrecked body suddenly fresh in my mind.
“Leo,” I answer.
I met Leo when I was in the Air Force. After I’d been reprimanded in Security Forces for poking my nose in where it didn’t belong, Leo gave me a job poking my nose in professionally.
I’d served the rest of my Air Force career as part of his team of special investigators.
Now he runs a private security firm while I do my own thing, which apparently includes walking back to run-down motel rooms in the middle of both the night and nowhere.
“Nightmares?” he asks. He knows. He always knows.
We’d grown close during our time in the Air Force together. And closer still once we were both out.
“Yeah,” I say. “Not bad, just … annoying.”
I sit up with a groan and put Leo on speaker.
I glance at the old bedside clock radio and find that it’s 6:21.
I always wake up at dawn. Whether the curtains are pulled or not, my circadian rhythm is apparently unshakable and, unless Leo’s working somewhere that phones aren’t an option, he calls every morning at dawn. My dawn. No matter where he is.
“You working?” Leo asks.
“Yeah.”
I hear the sounds of the city around him. Traffic and honking horns and, farther away, a jackhammer, people shouting. Leo lives a lot of his life in Manhattan, but I’ve always hated it there. The noise and the rush are bad enough, but the endless canyons of buildings also make me claustrophobic.
“I thought you were gonna go to some holiday shindig at Tina’s today. Where are you?”
“Mount Zion, Kentucky,” I say. I lie back on the bed and tell him about how Honey and I went off the road last night.
“Shit,” he breathes. And I hear the sudden urgency and worry in his voice. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Barked my knee. And my ribs are a little sore but I’m all right.”
“And Honey?”
I let out a long, shaky breath and start telling him how bad she is before I have to clamp my jaw shut to keep from crying.
“Damn,” he says. The world around him goes quiet and I assume he’s stepped into an alcove or a building lobby. “You think someone screwed with her brakes?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I won’t know until Tina gets here. I didn’t want to call the locals until I knew for sure.”
“You call me,” he says. “If you need me there.”
I smile to myself.
A friend of mine in Louisville met Leo once and, curious about our relationship, had asked Tina exactly what we are to each other.
She’d laughed and said, “They’re not a couple.
They don’t cohabitate or go on dates. They’ll never get married and they’re not conventionally exclusive.
But, at the end of the day, there’s no one else for either of them. They’re soul mates.”
I’ve never been able to come up with a better explanation than that.
“You sure you’re okay?” Leo asks. And his question, the tenderness in his voice, makes me more okay than before.
“Yeah,” I answer.
“Tell me about your case,” he says. “What the hell took you to Eastern Kentucky?”
I put him on speaker, push off the bed, wander into the bathroom. While I go about morning things, I tell him about Katie, her vision, her dad, and all the places I visited yesterday.
There’s a long pause and then he says, “Wait … did you say a snake-handling preacher?”
“Yeah. He had this church out in the boonies. You have to drive through this stretch of country called Brimstone Hollow and, apparently, in the middle of it is a sinkhole above a sulfur spring. People call it the Hell Hole.”
“Come on,” he says, “You’re shittin’ me.”
“Nope.”
He laughs now. It’s a deep, surprised belt of a laugh, and then he says, “Goddamn, I swear every time you leave Louisville, you get up to some of the most hillbilly horseshit. Jesus. You think his daughter was right? You think someone dusted him?”
“I think it’s possible,” I say. “Especially now. With what happened to Honey.”
“So your next call is Tina,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “But I won’t do it till after eight.”
“Good plan,” he says.
After years of terrible hours in the Air Force, Tina made it a rule never to be bothered before eight o’clock in the morning. Woe unto anyone who breaks that rule, especially if they’re calling with bad news.
“Actually,” I say. “I do have something you could help me with. You think you could get one of your contacts to run a plate for me?”
He makes a sound like pssshhh.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumble. I tell him about the truck that went past me the night before and then open the note on my phone and read the plate number to him. I don’t worry about him writing it down or recording it. Leo just remembers things. Tell him something once, it’s in there forever.
“You got your gun?” he asks.
“After last night? I’m not taking it off.”
“That’s what I like to hear. Listen, I’ll let you know when I’ve got something,” he says. “I’m heading up to Boston later on.”
“The protection job?”
“Yeah,” he says. “But call if you need me.”
His voice wraps around me like silk and I grin. When I look in the bathroom mirror and see myself smiling like a dope, I don’t even mind it.
“Okay,” I say.
“Watch your six, Gore.”
“Always, same to you.”
I hang up and take another long drink of water.
Normally, I run every morning, but standing there with my skinned knee and sore ribs, I decide to count my predawn trudge back to the motel as this morning’s exercise.
I take a shower, put on a fresh black T-shirt and jeans, lace up my boots, and head out the door.